Google Page Speed Test

While i Love nothing more than working on web sites and helping people with SEO There is a 500 pound Elephant in the room Here and that is the beloved Google Page Speed Test While i do Understand Google’s position on making a better product (ie faster net) They need to take a step back and look at themselves as well in this. Anybody who has used Ad Word’s Or any Google Property for that matter knows just how frustrating it can be, with lagging page speed.

There are other speed test’s available as well for those with concern over your site’s speed. There is the Pingdom Website Speed Test They are a neutral based testing site. They do get a ton of hits everyday to check speed’s for website’s. So what is a site owner to do, well there is a line between what looks great on a site Like video, fancy words bouncing in sideways. etc you get the idea.

Research by Kissmetrics showed that 40% of people will abandon a site if it takes longer than three seconds to load. 47% of users expect a page to load in two seconds or less.

Overall, the speed of your site has a greater impact on user satisfaction than extra “bells and whistles”. It doesn’t matter how great a site looks: if it loads too slowly, users will click away. If you are a WordPress user there are things you can do as well to improve speed. Did you know most hosting plans give you the bare bones memory? Below is a quick video to show you how to change that.

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Now a few other things as well, like ditch to many plug ins for the site. That to will drag the speed times down, I will be the first to admit that i used to have the fancy theme for my site here at Six Gun Group as well. But as you can see i have just a bare frame work now.

Use smaller images as well, i do love full size pic for a site. But lets be honest while looking good they do load sllllooooowwww.

Try and Optimize the Cashe on the site as well, Leveraging css on the site of witch most Cashe plugins will do.

While i do realize both sides of the coin here for site developers and Google wanting better page speed from site’s There has to be a line for both to come and make the net a better place for all parties involved here.

And i do hope that Google does take a look at it’s own properties as well. While i do realize this is your sand box, if you will.

Let’s be fair for all those out here trying to get that wonderful product called Traffic that we all need so badly.

Below is a Video From Google on Page speed if you want to learn more and what you can do to improve your site.

While i do love this stuff, (truth addicted) I really would like it if Google did some homework themselves. I did not want this to be an article about bashing them, more over on how frustrating it can be to use some of there product’s and yet we are expected to be the best, fastest etc.

How Useful and Functional is Google Page Speed Test?

The loading speed of a website is central to user experience. People will usually avoid a web-page that loads slowly. Therefore, a website that loads slowly provides a bad user experience, and this leads to loss of audience as visitors will not want to visit the website again. Likewise, a website that loads quickly is likely to provide good user experience, provided that other elements in the website are synchronized properly and quality content is presented in the right format. Accordingly, web developers and web-masters have given priority to the speed of the websites without compromising their functionality. Web developers and web-masters use Google Page Speed Test to measure the loading speeding of a website.

Google PageSpeed Test uses a set of metrics to rate a website. These metrics are degree of mobile friendliness, and the loading speed in both a desktop platform and a mobile platform. These metrics provide a value that is used to not only rate a website, but is also used to rank the website in Google search page results. This means that the loading speed of the website is determines the degree of search engine optimization (SEO). SEO-friendliness is key to optimization of web performance. Therefore, shorter loading speeds for webpages improves web performance optimization. However, the Google PageSpeed Test does not provide perfect results, and it is thus important for website owners to understand that the ratings of the Speed Test does not provide an accurate reflection of the true performance optimization of a website. The imperfectness of the Google PageSpeed Test is explained below.

Accuracy of Speed Measurements

Google PageSpeed Test, contrary to popular belief, does not provide an accurate measurement of how fast a website is. This can be proved easily when three websites with equal loading time are subjected to the PageSpeed Test. Each of these three websites will have a unique score. Therefore, according to the Page Speed Test, websites that have equal loading time have different loading speeds, and this is not exactly true. This also means that the PageSpeed grade does not provide an accurate score of really how fast a website is.

Moreover, there are some websites which load slowly but are rated higher by the PageSpeed Test as compared to other websites that lad faster. This is indicative of an inherent flaw in the design and operation of the algorithms and tool sets used by the Google Page Speed Test to measure and grade the loading speed of websites. This flaw is further manifested by the fact that a narrow range of loading speeds can result in a large variance in the range of the accompanying PageSpeed scores. For example, loading time that ranges from 500-600 milliseconds (ms) can results in Page Speed scores that range from 60-90. This shows that the PageSpeed test does not deliver an accurate assessment of the real loading speed of any website.

Google Bots

Google Bots crawl a website and fetch its webpages for indexing, caching, and rating. One of the rating criteria is the loading speed of the website. However, it is important for us to remember that the grade provided by the Google Page Speed Test is not an accurate assessment of the true loading speed of a website. This also means that Google Bots will crawl a website and rate it according to its true loading speed, and not the grade provided by the PageSpeed Test. In other words, Google Bots do not see the grade, but see the real elements in a website. Thus, the SEO performance of a website is not greatly impacted (either positively or negatively) by the score of the Page Speed Test. In consequence, a well-optimized website will still rank well even if it scored a low grade in the Speed Test.

Moreover, crawling bots of other search engine platforms, such as Yahoo, Bing, and DuckDuckGo, never consider the ratings of the Google PageSpeed Test. Therefore, the ranking of a website on these platforms depends primarily on the elements of the website and its degree of web performance optimization. It can also be deduced that the score of the Page Speed Test does not affect ranking of websites in any of the search engines currently in use.

Website Functionality

The metrics used by the Page Speed test are used to provide recommendations on how the performance of a website can be improved. These metrics measure loading speed in both the desktop environment and a mobile device platform. This means that a website optimized primarily for the desktop platform will a low score owing to its non-optimization for the mobile platform, regardless of the fact that the website may be loading incredibly fast in any desktop browser. One of the recommendations that is made in such a case is that the web developer and website owner make the website mobile-friendly. Even though this piece of advice is helpful in a broad sense, it is the other recommendations on how to achieve a mobile-friendly website that can lead one to break the functionality of the website and therefore end up doing more damage than good to the website. For instance, the recommendations can insist that the web developer and web-master leverage browser caching as well as eliminate CSS and render-blocking JavaScript in above-the-fold content. If these recommendations are followed literally, one can ruin the functionality of a website thus tapering off its performance and visibility to search engines.

Leveraging browser caching requires one to set an expiry date in HTTP headers, primarily to headers of static resources. This serves to instruct the web browser to load web pages that have been viewed previously from the local disk instead of loading them from the server of the website. This does drastically improve the loading time. But it also requires one to change the code of the website, and also alter CSS and JavaScript rendering. However, the second recommendation calls for elimination of both CSS and render-blocking JavaScript. If this is done, not only can one not leverage browser caching properly, but the functionality of the website will be negatively impacted, to the extent that the appearance of the website will change for the worse, thus leading to bad user experience and a blemished user interface. Consequently, visitors will neither visit the website regularly, nor can they recommend the website for others. Consequently, the ranking of the website will dip across search engine platforms due to poor website performance. Therefore, it is not prudent for one to take the recommendations made by Google after it has scored a website using the Page Speed Test.

In conclusion, Google Page Speed Test does not accurately measure how fast a website is, and its recommendation regarding how to improve the loading can lead one to break web functionality. Moreover, search engines do not consider the Page Speed score when ranking websites in their results page.